Posts by THMONSTER 28 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Mar 2012
After applying much wailing an gnashing of teeth on their social media accounts waiting and waiting for the Yodel delivery chimps to actually deign me worthy enough to actually deliver a parcel to me I now would not trust this company to hit the planet if they dropped out of the sky.
There are bad delivery firms and then there is Yodel class bad delivery firms.
I did a lot of LAN parties in the Leicester area years ago.
Many a time there would be beer soaked keyboards being washed out.
One incident that stuck in my mind was someone losing a laptop to a pint of beer.
Even though it was washed out straight away, that one never recovered.
A pint of vodka and orange dropping into the top case fan of my case didn't manage to kill my PC either.
I guess I just got lucky with that one though.
This reminds me of a monthly LAN party I used to attend in Leicester.
Power was always interesting there with people just plugging into empty sockets on 4/6 gangs as they arrived. This often lead to the power going out mid-game to howls of anguish from the participants. There were worse incidents though such as the plug melting in the socket at the end of a long line of computers, the smell of melting plastic was our first indication that something was wrong.
There were plenty of incidents of participants, drunkenly coming in from the pub at which it was hosted, tripping over the cables and again there were howls of anguish from all around the room. After one such incident, one off the guys who was on the row which went down looked more shocked than usual when this regular occurrence happened. It turned out that he thought to protect his cherished hardware with a little UPS for his PC so that he could gracefully shut down instead of the power just dying. What he did not realise is that as people arrived they just plugged into the nearest socket as usual and when the power went down, everyone on his row was relying on his UPS which lasted mere seconds, if that, before it crapped itself and also died.
There were other incidents too such as guys running in after moving their precious 21" CRTs into the hall from their cars through a rainstorm and having them go bang as soon as they plugged them in due to water in the sockets. Most of these problems were not helped at all with the events being held in the back room of the pub in which we would quaff vast amounts of ale in before deciding it was time to actually set up the PCs in a very drunken state.
As you can imagine there are lots of other stories of other participants woes, most of which you would have to know the people to see the real humour in the situation but in of themselves are still very amusing.
I do so miss those types of LAN parties but we will probably never see the likes of that one again.
There will be a usage case for it once enough people have it, just as other technological limits have been raised and the potential filled. Who would have thought 10 - 20 years ago that 4k streaming via the net would have been a thing as the sizes of the data were deemed to be colossal yet here we are.
I know it is a bit of a 'if you build it, they will come' scenario but I think there will be unthought of usage cases where we will think in years to come 'why didn't I think of that?'
There's no escape from Luton, its one way system around the town centre ensures a steady collection of cars are funnelled in and will never escape.
I think there is some sort of attempt to get enough cars to collapse themselves into a half arsed black hole so that Luton an disappear from the face of the earth forever, a worthy cause if ever I heard one.
Also have had experience of truck and forklift batteries exploding (forklift was a diesel model so not too bad, just a large 12v) in my days as a truck mechanic before I ended up slumped behind a keyboard and wall of monitors.
They certainly do go with quite a bang, one of the truck batteries went whilst jump starting it with another truck and caused a gas cloud to pour from the battery in question.
Other activities were far more dangerous at that job though, spare time and high pressure air from the compressor makes for crazy dangerous inventions.
Half inch thick bolts launched hundreds of yards were a regular occurrence!
The devil makes work for idle hands!
As a truck mechanic years ago a group of us had one of the artics up to 50MPH at a standstill wheel spinning on ice in the yard.
It would have been interesting if the tyres would have worn through the ice, Volvo F12's were not renowned for having the strongest half shafts in the business.
Also got a few of these, deleted the first which then was sent again, blocked the sender and deleted and it appeared again, blocked and left the third which just stayed at the top of my feed refusing to go down the messages list as other messages do even though I get a lot of messages from others in Whatsapp.
Facebook's first foray into unwanted spam on Whatsapp or some telemarketeer taking advantage of some bug?
Message has now gone though so I am siding with the latter of the two choices but am just waiting for the day that the first one becomes a reality.
I personally have been through this particular mill when working for a well known credit referencing agency.
280 people were whisked away on coaches one morning to be told that only 40 of them would be required and that we were to train up our replacements.
By the end of the time for training I was still amazed that a job that took 1 guy in our department a couple of hours to resolve took the guys in India 10 days or more to do.
You might pay them 10 times less but when they take 10 times the amount of time to do the work then it does not even out.
Losses snowball as others cannot do their jobs and customers are faced with ridiculous delays.
The balance sheet does not look so great to the beancounters that propose this sort of a move after a while but ho hum - off to the next company to wreak their particular brand of 'business expertise'.
Bastards the lot of them.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
